Sabre Jet (1953)

Overrated

Good movie but grossly overrated

Did you people see the same film I saw?

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This independent United Artist release is a small nugget of gold among a lot of aviation pictures made on much bigger budgets. Sabre Jet makes good use of aerial combat footage from Korea, nicely integrated into the plot of this film which is really about the home life of our fighter pilots flying missions in the Korean War from a base in Japan.I doubt the enlisted men of the Air Force did this well, but for our fighter pilots the Air Force provided housing and the wives and children lived on the base and though it looks tacky, it's like any other suburban community. The pilots just take off in the morning, do their bit in Korea and then come home for supper to home and hearth. The only difference is that some do make it home and some don't in Sabre Jet.Coleen Gray is a reporter and the estranged wife of Colonel Robert Stack whose been given an assignment to do a human interest story on the wives and she chooses Stack's base for the assignment. The two are estranged as Stack is an alpha male who wants the women home, barefoot and he'll take care of the pregnant department. It's a bit rough with Stack for her, but Gray gets a lot of good material from the other wives at the base. They want to talk about their men, they're proud military wives. Her best material comes from Julie Bishop the wife of base commander Richard Arlen. In fact some of the best scenes are with Bishop and Arlen and their two boys.The last 10 minutes or so are devoted to an aerial dogfight and the combat footage is well integrated into the black and white film. Like many other air films post World War II Sabre Jet is a recruiting film for the new United States Air Force. So for that matter is Top Gun made a generation or two later.Stack, Gray, Arlen, and Bishop and the rest aren't big in the hero department. They're the guys who have a tough day at the office and the women who wait for them. Sabre Jet shot on an F string budget is a nice film, no frills, but good performances throughout and nice aerial combat footage.

Agree with you guys about some of the stock footage. TOP GUN, it ain't, but, even the bad stuff is good, since,,, ya can't see any real Sabre Jets anymore,,, except for ONE that has been restored and does the air shows. Early Robert Stack is priceless, considering his Elliot Ness, and Airplane work with Zucker and Abrams. The part that always got me was the Korean pilot who got shot up, and rips off his face mask. In the theatrical version I saw, that was when a black and white movie switched to color for all the blood in the cockpit. Yeeecht!~! The McConnell Story is a bit better, and The Hunters is better yet, especially for the flying sequences, but this one was thoroughly enjoyable for a ten year old kid who loved airplanes and lived for those Saturday Matinée double features. So, yeah, it's a turkey, but, what the heck --- Gobble Gobble~!!~! ;-)

This has to be the worst aviation movie ever.At first, when I saw it listed on my upcoming viewing list, I was excited, as I had never seen this picture. Now I know why I had never seen it.I almost feel like digging up the writers, producers and director of this bomb and ask for compensation for the time I wasted watching it.The use of stock footage is badly edited and contains many shots of WWII aircraft and if you are an aviation buff at all, you have seen these shots a hundred times and can recognize each aircraft used. American and German WWII aircraft abound in this Korean era story. There is not even an attempt to make these shots work as Korean era combat.What was the budget for this turkey? Using F-86 aircraft poorly disguised to represent MiGs is terrible. Yuck, horrible. Mere words cannot express how bad, with a capital B, this picture is.Avoid it at all cost.Pass it by. This movie stinks !

Uninspired melodrama combines with lavish use of stock footage in this cheapie Korean War propaganda flick.Although the Sabre jet surely qualifies as one of the most beautiful fighters ever built, you have to get more than halfway into this movie before you even see one. You can learn a thing or two about combining stock footage (in this case, beauty shots of F-84 Thunderjets and -- eventually -- the F-86 Sabre) with WWII-era gun camera footage into a slovenly simulation of ground attacks and aerial combat, but that's about the only excuse I can imagine for enduring this gobbler.I'm not one of those sticklers for absolute accuracy in every detail of a military film, but this one is such a brainless mishmash of piecemeal splicing it's often quite hilarious (if you're an aviation history buff). For instance, in the climactic battle, where they're supposed to be strafing and bombing an airfield full of MIGs, the planes getting chewed to pieces and blown up on the ground are obviously WWII-vintage propellor-driven aircraft, German, Japanese and -- if I'm not mistaken -- some American planes, courtesy of Japanese gun cameras. During the dogfight that develops as the Sabre jets fly escort for the bombers, pay attention and you'll see a P-38 and a LuftWaffe BF-109 go down in flames!Outside of its revolting message about the proper role of a military wife and its strident Cold War ideology, one truly shameful moment in this film occurs when the hero (Robert Stack) is ordered to blow up an ammunition dump hidden in a house somewhere along a road. So how does he identify this concealed dump? By randomly shooting up houses until he gets the right one! ("Sooner or later, I just gotta hit paydirt...")Don't waste your time with this threadbare nonsense, when there are far better films -- like "The Bridges At Toko-Ri" or even "The Hunters" -- covering the same subject matter.